Silicon Christmas

Now, you know the coils ain't even buzzin', little generator won't get the spark
Motor's in a bad condition, you gotta have these batteries charged
But I'm cryin', please, please don't do me wrong
Who been drivin' my Terraplane now for you since I been gone?
— Robert Johnson, “Terraplane Blues”

My first computer arrived like the Baby Jesus, swaddled in vestments of Christmas in the Year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-two. A beige plastic box about the size of, handily enough, an infant, with comfortingly rounded edges, tapering somewhat toward the front like an oversized doorstop. Upon this fundament stood a battalion of licorice-colored keys with real heft to them, unlike the squat, lifeless keyboards of our degenerate age. Each boxy acrylonitrile butadiene styrene actuator was imprinted atop with a white letter, and two mystical symbols appeared on the front face, indicating a brace of mysterious secondary functions assigned to that key when pressed in tandem with CTRL or one of its arcane brethren. In the upper left corner of the case, opposite a livid crimson LED which glowed sharply when the juice was flowing, was a modest nameplate bearing the moniker: “Commodore VIC-20.”

I couldn’t have known then what an influential gift this would turn out to be. Like all of us I’m cocooned by computers, and infested by them as well, but I also minister to them, and have done for nearly forty years, occasionally to some measure of joy and profit. It was a modest beginning—the VIC-20 was famously short of resources: it’s capacity to retain information relative to the laptop upon which I type this was as a postage stamp is to Liechtenstein. Of this penurious allowance only about thirty-six hundred characters’ worth—about a third of this essay—was available for programs and data, the remainder set aside to keep track of a stingy display comprising twenty-two columns and twenty-three rows of rectangular sigils. If you’d like an idea what that looks like, here’s a passage from the VIC-20 manual as it might have appeared on my screen:

                   And the whole earth wa

                   s of one language, and

                   of one speech.

                   And it came to pass, a

                   s they traveled from t

                   he east, that they fou

                   nd a plain in the land

                   of Shinar; and they dw

                   elt there.

                   And they said one to a

                   nother, let us make br

                   icks, and burn them th

                   oroughly. And they had

                   brick for stone, and s

                   lime had they for mort

                   ar.

                   And they said one to a

                   nother, let us build a

                   city and a tower, whos

                   e top may reach unto h

I know, right? Reach unto what? Hartford, Connecticut?

Anyway, that doesn’t really do it justice because unless you were David Rockefeller you were using a television for a monitor and old cathode-ray tube televisions had a 4:3 display ratio that meant pixels were far wider than they were tall. Everything had this stretched, tumbling-into-a-black-hole sort of aesthetic, rendering the verse above like something that should be trailing from behind a biplane over a baseball stadium.

So if you succeeded in writing some sort of useful program the output of which would be comprehensible on this tiny display and which would fit into the VIC-20’s change purse-sized memory, at least you’d have some peace of mind knowing that you won’t be wasting time loading such a puny application from disk, right? Well, VIC-20 floppy drives were almost a thousand bucks, so if you were a kid like me you were probably loading your programs from cassette tapes using a Commodore Datasette, which was nothing more than a boxy little tape player very much like the one from Fisher Price. It had a reputation for being glacially slow, as evidenced by the withered and shrunken bodies that were often found in the homes of VIC-20 owners throughout the 80s, propped at their desks in poses suggestive of bated anticipation, often with the mellifluous shrieks and squeals of the data tapes still echoing through their sullen chambers and scaring the shit out of cats that had managed to stay alive by consuming their masters’ toes. 

This was all a moot scenario for me because I wasn’t a kid like me: I didn’t have a floppy drive or a Datasette. The storage solution I settled on was keeping the computer on at all times. Since my work station was the dining room table, this strategy often ran afoul of meals, which had to be served around both VIC and TV. More frequently the conflicts predicated a lot of protesting followed by capitulation and the tragic loss of precious data when the plug was pulled. 

In short, it was a pretty attenuated machine, even by the standards of the day, and the standards of the day didn’t include most of what we think about when we think about computers. The Internet was something for researchers and government types, and frankly most people didn’t even know it existed. Modems and bulletin board systems were still a couple years off. Games were available but cost money I didn’t have. The VIC-20 came with a built-in programming language—Beginner’s All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC), and that was pretty much it. 

Yet, it was probably the best Christmas present I ever received. I still can’t fathom how my mom was able to afford it; 1982 was a ghastly year for my family—two deaths, an attempted suicide, and a recession that hit us especially hard. By December we were holding it together with painter’s tape and thumbtacks. And yet there it was under the tree on Christmas Day. I unboxed it, plugged it in, and immediately started writing little programs. I didn’t know how to do much but I enjoyed making simple choose-your-own adventure games in which the computer would give a description of a scene and present the player with two or three choices each of which led to a new branch of the story. It was a model well-suited to my vast ignorance of programming, and I paired it with computer magazines, which always featured a BASIC program listing, usually a game or a graphical demo. If you were desperate enough, you could laboriously type these programs into your computer and run them until your sister tripped over the power cable, yanking it sharply from the wall and causing the plug to whip round and dink you in the side of the head. But until then you could enjoy a mediocre game, and anyway the real value in the exercise was the typing, because it gave you a chance to see what could be done with BASIC. Invariably you’d make mistakes, so if you didn’t want to just chalk up the previous forty-five minutes as time forever lost, you had to learn under duress how to debug. And for a while after you were done, you had direct access to a piece of code that did something fairly complex. You could poke at it and figure out ways to change it, make your own additions and emendations. 

This was a far better way to learn programming than any class I’ve ever seen or heard of. 

My VIC-20 was the only Christmas present I ever received that became a career, but that’s not what was truly great about it. I’ve worked in computers for close to twenty-five years and while it has been remunerative, I have very mixed feelings about the work—computers are just the ball bearings of the much larger and morally questionable hegemonic system that gives us Twitter and the Proud Boys and the PS5 and McDonalds and iPhones and Donald Trump; some of these things are good and some are bad and some are both but they are all forces beyond our control, and one of the great appeals of the computers to me in 1982 was that it represented a whole universe of possibility over which I had dictatorial power. 

Those were heady days. These days pretty much suck. 

This past May I finished a master’s degree in computer science, granted to me by the Georgia Institute of Technology. It was a tough row to hoe and I did well and earned the degree and I’m proud of it. But all the while I was doing it I was trying to figure out what I was doing it for. I knew there was virtually zero chance I was going to cash in and go work for some big tech name as part of a battalion of coders hacking together the latest voice-activated toilet or writing software to power the Uber-ization of chili cookoffs or anything else purporting to be the future arrived to save us from manual labor or inconvenience or loneliness through the miracle of touch-capacitive screens, accelerometers, and multicore processors. But what, then, would I do with this degree?

This question generated a lot of stress for me, to the point it would interfere with my studies. So I would habitually put it aside. Graduate first, I told myself, and then decide what you want to do. And then I graduated, and still the answer wasn’t there. So I drank a lot and had a miserable several weeks until I eventually decided to devote myself to writing, which I could have done in the first place. 

But the truth of the matter is that I got what I wanted out of the degree while I was earning it. I spent many months around the end of last year and the beginning of this one studying a famous problem in computer science: P versus NP. What makes this such a significant topic is that it bears on the nature of problems themselves, whether distinct classes of problems are related and possibly just different facets of the same problem, and conversely whether an algorithm designed to solve one type of problem can solve another type. It’s esoteric stuff, and far closer to mathematics than, say, making an iPhone app. It’s also fascinating. Here, in the middle of a discipline concerned with unthinking machines is a question that suggests things about the shape of existence itself.

It was that revelatory sense that I’d been missing all these years; the computer for its own sake, as an expression of universal principles. And in that subject I rediscovered what was great about that VIC-20 as well. It wasn’t a game, or a phone, or an encyclopedia, or a map—it wasn’t, in short, its applications, which is just as well because there were so few. It was just this crazy weird symbol manipulating machine, packed to the gills with the products of human intuition, still as genius in the particulars of its function as it was the day I unwrapped that box. 

That’s all I ever really cared about vis-a-vis computers. All the other folderol is just human nature magnified and boiled into an aspic mold full of spiders and razor blades. I may yet find a place to wield the degree I spent three years earning, but I earned something else—the key to an abiding place to which I can retreat in times of stress and strain, reveling in the pure and labyrinthine logic of mathematics laid out in mechanical terms; concrete, unimpeachable, unalloyed, and eternal.

Happy holidays y’all. I hope you receive your heart’s desire.